Nothing necessarily wrong with the DOS program anyway- if it works, why break it?

You should be able to run it pretty easily with either a virtual machine or an emulator- you can then look at extracting from it the data and migrating it to a flashier site. Sticking with the DOS program sounds like the simpler solution for now.

If the taxpayer wasn't funding your solar panels, it would be financially unviable.

Sadly, solar power at this level will always be pointless- far better to spend our taxpayers' money on something meaningful (e.g. a good power station) than waste time and money on subsidising PV panels on individual houses.

I wish you well with your payback in 12 years!

I hope governments (US and UK) stop subsidising these panels and let them succeed or fail on their merits, instead of an opaque quasi-benefits system.

You can write insecure websites using pretty much any tools, but if you're using MySQL and PHP, especially if you're using other peoples code in your app, you're probably going to end up with a security nightmare, regardless of how hard you try.

That's the problem.

Most of the pros on here can write good-quality, secure code, in PHP, RoR, whatever.

It's the external libraries which are the gap. For example, look at phplist, which is used in many places. Now, every installation of it needs to be upgraded. Now. Right now.

Unless you're a 100% fulltime sysadmin, you haven't got the time to be reading the security lists hourly and upgrading phplist etc when required.

The OP is really asking: how do I make sure phplist and the other hundred Ruby gems or PHP add-ins are up-to-date and safe? And keep them that way?

as for spoiling the view, that imo is a lesser price to pay for true clean power...

So you'd be happy to block in all your windows with energy efficient materials to reduce heat loss?

(Unless you live next to a concrete prison) there's always going to be a point where you say "no, I don't want power that much that I would spoil the view".

Anyway, wind power has SO many problems (e.g. power distribution, only working when windy & warm enough etc) that I really can't see how it would function in a purely objective free market ie one without "green grants".

Didn't stop us being forcibly upgraded from our "1.5 mbps" service to the bright and sparkling "8 mbps" service...Now it seems the router/exchange tries really hard to get us value for money and the connection is more unreliable than before. Lost packets... high latency.. (Someone will point out that BT blocks unreliable slow connections down to something like 140kbps- yes, happens frequently).

I'd rather pay for the old, "slower" service.

(I'd also point out that the average person on Facebook wouldn't know the difference between 1mbps or 8mbps)

Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday November 03, 2008 @08:14AM
from the coin-of-the-realm dept.

bmsleight writes "The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition to design not a building, but rather the new 5-Euro commemorative coin. The theme was 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winning design was made 100% with free software, mainly Python, but also including The Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch, and Ubuntu. The design is amazing — the head of Queen Beatrix is made up of the names of architects based on their popularity in Yahoo searches (rendered in a font of the artist's own devising). In the end the artist, Stani Michiels, had to collaborate closely on location with technicians of the Royal Dutch Mint, so all the last bits were done on his Asus Eee PC. Soon, 350,000 Dutch people will use and enjoy the fruits of free software."